Christine O'Donnell No Oxford Alumna

Since winning the GOP Senate nomination in Delaware earlier this month,
Christine O'Donnell has been denounced
by the Republican establishment and been forced to clarify that she is
not, in fact, a practicing witch.
Could things get any worse for the Tea Party favorite? In the wake of a
new discrepancy
unearthed by the Washington Post regarding O'Donnell's LinkedIn resume
(specifically her claims she studied at Oxford and Claremont College;
the schools say she was never enrolled), the answer seems to be yes.
Around the Internet, her plight failed to elicit much sympathy.

Troubling
Pattern The new revelations mark the third and fourth charge of resume
padding leveled against O'Donnell (she long claimed to hold a degree
from Farleigh
Dickinson despite only graduating last summer and was forced to
clarify a Weekly
Standard article which said she was studying for a Master's at
Princeton), allegations Hot Air's Diane
Suffern argues are particularly damaging in light of O'Donnell's
efforts to brand herself as a straight-talking political outsider. "Once
is misspeaking," writes Suffern, "twice is an odd coincidence. (Kindly,
please don't do it again, Ms. O'Donnell.) Three times is clearly an
issue. Four? That's a pattern indicative of character and for someone
with no record, we have only her character to recommend her."

Turning
Off The Base Newsweek's Ben
Adler believes the story will be particularly damaging given the
anti-elitist tenor of the modern GOP. Writes Adler:

Pretending
that you took courses at Princeton or Oxford when you did not, and you
are many years past college-age, demonstrates that you think having done
so is really a necessary credential. Aside from the sheer patheticness
of such insecurity, it is the ultimate reification of the elitist idea
that middle-aged adults should continue to define themselves by the
academic credentials they obtained in their youth and that the best
schools are old, expensive institutions that started out only allowing
only white Christian males to attend.

Parsing O'Donnell's
clarification that her Oxford course was actually a "Phoenix Institute"
class on "Post Modernism in the New Millenium" that was just held in an Oxford classroom isn't winning over New York magazine's
Dan
Amira. "So," Amira writes, "she didn't actually take an Oxford
University class, she took a Phoenix Institute class that was held in a
building owned by Oxford University. That is basically just as
impressive though. Oxford!"

Easy Fix The Guardian's Michael
Tomasky says there's an easy way to check O'Donnell's claim she
took a course called Post Modernism in the New Millenium. Offers
Tomasky, "If she's really a postmodernist worth her salt, she'll be able
to explain that the term University of Oxford is just socially
constructed anyway."